No timeline for online jail roster

NEW ULM – Brown County remains without a public online jail roster following scams that led to the department taking down the website.

Back in August, Brown County Sheriff’s Office warned of scams circulating that exploited family members with people in jail. Utilizing the online roster, scammers would reach out to the family of recently arrested individuals and ask for bail money.

To combat the issue, the roster was removed temporarily, leaving the public without access to jail roster information.

"We took it down to have time to review with our IT team to limit information that would be beneficial for hackers," Chief Deputy Andrew Konechne said.

More than a month out from the initial removal of the website, there is still no timeline for getting the website back up.

"We are working with IT but they are tasked with other priority things," Konechne said.

Konechne said that it is not required by law to have a public jail roster posted online, but they hope to bring the website back up so the community can have access to the information.

Until then, Konechne gave an alternate solution to receiving jail roster information. Data requests for jail roster information can be submitted directly to sheriffs.

Jail roster scams have been circulating all around Minnesota and Konechne said that he has been in contact with other counties that have experienced similar issues.

"We've been in touch to see what they've been doing," Konechne said.

Two neighboring counties, Nicollet and Blue Earth, both have public jail rosters online.

Nicollet Sheriff Aaron Petersen said that Nicollet County has not been receiving reports of these jail roster scams.

"But if we do, I imagine we would respond in a similar way," Petersen said.

Blue Earth Chief Deputy Jeremey Brennan said that they have had similar issues with scams.

"We've had a couple occurrences of people asking if it's real or not," Brennan said.

Despite these occurrences, Blue Earth's jail roster remains online.

"We've just been telling people that call in that it's a scam and that we don't call people for bond," Brennan said.

For more information, call the Brown County Sheriff’s Office at 507-233-6700 or visit www.browncountymn.gov.